Posts Tagged ‘The Blorg’

This goes into the category of pages that took forever to draw but take very little time to read. Entrances typically take a while to draw because I always try to make them look different, even when they’re for the same guys. I remember when I drew wrestling comics in elementary school based on WWF and WCW I always drew the exact same entrance: a straight-on shot of the wrestler posing on the stage after coming out of the entry curtain (this was back when RAW still used the classic Attitude-era set with the entry area inset a little bit). That was fine when I was 13, but now that I actually know what I’m doing I like to try to shake it up a little bit. Drawing four separate entrances on one page makes that a little more difficult.

John Bradley leaning in to try to get on camera in the first panel wasn’t planned in the thumbnails, but when I drew the page at normal size I messed up a little bit on Blorg’s positioning and didn’t have enough room to fit John Bradley into a normal two-shot. I sketched out the lean-in a little bit and thought it was a nice visual bit for a page that doesn’t have much of an actual joke.

There was a lot of thinking involved in figuring out how to approach the tag team titles in this match, with a few different directions being considered. One discarded scenario was that Doc would somehow convince/provoke LGN or their warden into putting up the tag team titles in this match, but the payoff of that situation didn’t really work in the long term projection of where the comic is going. After talking it over and bouncing ideas off of Dan Schneider (artist for the back-up story in HEAT Volume 1, available now) we came up with what you just read, which plants some seeds for later on while providing a reminder that the tag team titles A) exist and B) are desireable. So the opposite of how WWE treats their tag team titles, basically. You’ll have to keep reading to find out what exactly this altercation might lead to, though.

Hart Attack jokes are kind of like the title jokes I write for Johnny Law matches: awful puns that I don’t feel even the slightest bit badly about thoroughly abusing. I think this might be my favourite page in this match, mostly because of how much fun it was to do all of the motion stuff while Dick is bouncing back and forth on the ropes. The motion of him slamming his helmet into Dos was more of a challenge than a joy, as I ended up drawing and erasing various attempts at it for a few hours before finally ending up with one I liked (that process included erasing what I had thought the night before would be the completed panel because I realized the next day that I hated it).

While you can clearly see that I eventually settled on having Dick and Ron use a modified Hart Attack as a tag team signature, you didn’t see the whole whack of other moves I considered first. If it was a tag team move from the late ’80s/early ’90s and I could figure out how to work a headbutt into it, I worked out a spot involving it. I came really close to using the PowerPlex (anybody else remember Power & Glory?) with a diving headbutt replacing Paul Roma’s big splash, but I couldn’t come up with a sequence I liked for it.

On Wednesday: Three count or kick in the back of the head? Both are fine choices, whatever floats your boat, really.

I wrote more HEAT scripts today for the first time in, like, a month. I’m in the mid 180s now, script-wise, and not quite as far ahead as I would like to be art-wise. And to think, I had a thirteen strip buffer not so long ago. I get two weeks off from school before I start my practicum, so hopefully I’ll be able to build the buffer back up a little bit during that time.

If you don’t get Doc’s line about the backdrop, take a look back at HEAT #92. Or just crack open your copy of HEAT Volume 1, because you’ve surely gotten your hands on a copy by now. Haven’t you? Well it’s a good thing you can order it right here.

On Saturday: If you don’t watch your cholesterol you’ll have a Hart Attack.

I love awful sequel subtitles. A lot. Any title ending in “the re(blank)ening” WILL get a laugh out of me, pretty much guaranteed.

Oh, and I also forgot about the update yesterday because I spent pretty much all day at work and then writing an essay for school. It was really nice of my professors to make all of the semester’s major assignments due in a three day span next week. It was also nice of the University to decide that a semester condensing four months worth of work into two months.

Special man-pain was such a goofy joke the last time these two teams clashed that I decided to bring it back, especially once I wrote the spot where Dos got crotched on the turnbuckle.

On Wednesday: Hot tag! He’s cleaning house! That doesn’t make sense, as cleaning a house typically isn’t an activity that involves violence!

No, seriously, it’s like 50/50 whether or not Doc Crockett is about to murder Tim Van Patten on live pay-per-view. Except that I know what happens because I wrote it, and these pages were drawn over a month ago. Which is good since nowadays my time to draw HEAT pages is sadly limited by having actual real-life crap to do. Incidentally, next Saturday’s post will probably be done either from work or from my phone during the Real Canadian Wrestling show, which features Demolition. Yes, Ax and Smash. No, I don’t care that they’re probably in their 60s and can barely move, it’s going to be fucking awesome.

On Wednesday: We return to our regularly scheduled match while Doc Crockett stomps the piss and other fluids out of Tim Van Patten on the floor. They’re probably going to want to burn those mats later.

“The works” in the title is code for “Ron’s skull.” Also, I kind of hate using the word “skull” now that WWE commentary uses it incessantly while completely ignoring that synonyms exist for a reason. Seriously, I’m pretty sure they mention somebody getting hit in the skull in just about every match. It also gives some credence to the “unsafe work environment” bit when the response to being constantly smashed in the head is “walk it off, pussies.” Not that I’m complaining. Wrestling would be boring as shit if a thump to the dome resulted in missing weeks upon weeks of action like they do now in other sports. I’m looking at you, Sidney “I’m going to hold a press conference to tell people that I still have a concussion and that I have no updates as to when I’ll be back on the ice but the Canadian media is going to make a huge deal out of it anyway” Crosby. He has a long nickname.

Also, this is the first blood in quite a while, if I recall correctly. I try to approach blood a little bit more realistically in HEAT than it’s typically handled in wrestling, because being hit in the head with a solid object is typically going to lead to blood. On the other hand, I try to make sure I don’t go the TNA route and have guys getting busted open ten seconds into a three minute match.

Later update than usual as I just got home an hour ago, but at least I remembered what day it was this time.

I had no idea when I first used “Spanish gibberish” as a line that I would be making callbacks to it over a year later, since at the time it was a throwaway just to get a joke on a page that otherwise wouldn’t have one. Now it’s become the entirety of Los Gordinflones Negros’ dialogue throughout their tenure in the comic.

I had to look up whether the move Ron uses in the middle panel was an Argentine or Canadian backbreaker, because for some reason the idea of having the wrong name in the script bugged the shit out of me. But rest assured, me, because it’s a Canadian backbreaker.

Guess who was doing homework all last night and forgot that it was Wednesday? Me. The answer is me.

The corner spring spot took more panels to make clear than I thought it would, but it actually wasn’t as tough to draw as a bunch of way simpler moves. The back suplex was pretty easy, too, but I found a pretty good reference that just needed a little bit of tweaking, because for some reason nobody in Japan does the leg scoop thing that North American wrestlers do all the time. It’s also a reference back to a move Dick learned the hard way earlier, because I really like to do little call-backs for those sorts of things, even though I’m probably the only one who notices them.

On Saturday: Dick gets tired of throwing Uno around like a sack of potatoes. Good thing it’s a tag team match, then, hey?

Guess who was out all day and didn’t realize he hadn’t uploaded today’s page to the FTP server yet? I am now also aware that I haven’t scanned anything past page 165, so now you know what my afternoon is going to be composed of tomorrow.

Drawing an exploder AND having the camera reverse angles twice during the execution of the move is REALLY hard. And my own stupid fault, like pretty much every other thing in this comic that ends up being really hard to draw. I also tend to get it in my head that I have tons and tons of reference for whatever move I find myself having to draw only to spend an hour combing through a stack of wrestling magazines to arrive at the realization that I must have somehow hallucinated that reference, because in 12 magazines there were like, two small pictures of moves that vaguely resembled a t-bone suplex.

On Wednesday: Uno didn’t actually explode, but you’d think his heart would explode after having already wrestled once on this card. ‘Cause he’s fat.